Yes so why have it on the pi at all? All this about maintaining two directories is a waste of time, you don’t need to run esphome at all on the pi!
Yes, as i cant manage the devices on the pi, ESPHome is just waste installed on the Pi. Im just entertaining thoughts if there was a way to forward the compiling elsewhere to then have a working gui on the RPi of all my ESP devices. Although it does not use much any resources outside of compiling stuff, still taking some unnecessary space. You are right there.
Where? I installed ESP Home on my Windows 10 machine so that I can continue to use my RPi to run HA and compile on a more powerful machine. I downloaded the yaml that failed to compile on my pi and ran esphome run <yaml file>.
It failed, stating Error reading file secrets.yaml: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'secrets.yaml' I downloaded secrets.yaml and ran it again. Same error.
I have been looking for a couple of days, and there is nothing I can find that tells a command-line new user where essential files, like the secrets file should go, or where individual yaml files should be placed on the system to create a controlled/organized directory structure.
You have given lots of smiley faces and winks, but you seem to be unaware of how poorly ESP Home and Home Assistant are documented for new users. It is one of the worst documented projects at this scale I have seen in a long time. Yes, there are lots of documents, but for all intents and purposes, they are sitting on a huge library of undocumented tribal knowledge - lots of “snarfle the garthok and then kreg the atticon” statements. Experienced users know exactly what that means, but no one has clearly defined it for noobs. As an example, look at any component page on the ESP Home site. Nearly every one of them uses ellipses (…) without any explanation as to what options are available, or even that a specific value is required. The word “platform” has at least three very different meanings in the world of HA/ESP Home, with no clarity in documents which meaning is relevant on a specific doc. The landing page for ESP Home uses two of the meanings on that page alone. Look at most of the suggestions on this thread alone and consider whether a noob would understand it. It took me nearly a month to recognize that Home Assistant, not ESP Home, is the suite that defined the yaml syntax used in ESP Home.
You can’t download secrets.yaml because they are your secrets. No one else can create then for you.
On esphome secrets.yaml should be in the same directory as your esphome yaml files.
Let’s hope that by the time you are finished the docs have improved. I have to admit that the esphome docs aren’t easy. Sometimes experienced people don’t document well.
How about you tell us what the absolute beginners guide to esphome should look like and include. We’ll go from there.
You are right. I copied the contents to a text file. I downloaded the device yaml file. I have reached such a level of irritation with ESPHome that I misspoke what was downloaded and what was copied… I placed that secrets.yaml file in the same directory as the device yaml file. That secrets.yaml file has exactly the same contents as the one stored on the HA system. ESPHome commandline obviously detected the secrets.yaml, since it stopped complaining that it didn’t exist and gave no alerts that the device file was calling to use secrets not stored in the secrets file.
Even with the secrets.yaml file in the same directory, the device would not connect to the WiFi network, even though the contents of secrets.yaml were a direct copy/paste from the working secrets file on the HA host system.
ONE PROBLEM SOLVED, dozens still remain. I had to re-save the secrets.yaml file after saving it with Unix/Linux EOL characters (0x10) instead of Windows EOL (0x10, 0x13). This was necessary even though the value for each of the variables in the secrets file is properly quoted. I’d wager that less than one in a thousand people starting with HA/ESP Home would have thought to try changing the EOL conversion - it was a crazy random shot in the dark. This is something most people don’t even have the software to do in Windows.
EOL has nothing to do with quoting, but the fact that on windows the secrets.yaml the line endings have to be different is worth noting when we fix the docs, assuming you are interested in that.